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Teaching Community

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Ten years ago, bell hooks astonished readers with Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom . Now comes Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope - a powerful, visionary work that will enrich our teaching and our lives. Combining critical thinking about education with autobiographical narratives, hooks invites readers to extend the discourse of race, gender, class and nationality beyond the classroom into everyday situations of learning. bell hooks writes candidly about her own experiences. Teaching, she explains, can happen anywhere, any time - not just in college classrooms but in churches, in bookstores, in homes where people get together to share ideas that affect their daily lives. In Teaching Community bell hooks seeks to theorize from the place of the positive, looking at what works. Writing about struggles to end racism and white supremacy, she makes the useful point that "No one is born a racist. Everyone makes a choice." Teaching Community tells us how we can choose to end racism and create a beloved community. hooks looks at many issues-among them, spirituality in the classroom, white people looking to end racism, and erotic relationships between professors and students. Spirit, struggle, service, love, the ideals of shared knowledge and shared learning - these values motivate progressive social change. Teachers of vision know that democratic education can never be confined to a classroom. Teaching - so often undervalued in our society -- can be a joyous and inclusive activity. bell hooks shows the way. "When teachers teach with love, combining care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust, we are often able to enter the classroom and go straight to the heart of the matter, which is knowing what to do on any given day to create the best climate for learning."

216 pages, Paperback

First published November 30, 2002

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About the author

bell hooks

127 books11.2k followers
bell hooks (born Gloria Jean Watkins) was an African-American author, feminist, and social activist. Her writing focused on the interconnectivity of race, class, and gender and their ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and domination. She published over thirty books and numerous scholarly and mainstream articles, appeared in several documentary films and participated in various public lectures. Primarily through a postmodern female perspective, she addressed race, class, and gender in education, art, history, sexuality, mass media and feminism.

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Displaying 1 - 30 of 121 reviews
Profile Image for Kendra.
5 reviews
July 1, 2017
incredible

Adding the quotes I noted for my own reference here (private notes section was too small).

(xv) definition of dialogue: "both sides are willing to change" - Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhan Hanh

(22) "my commitment to radical openness and devotion to critical thinking... was at odds with the demands that I uphold the status quo if I wanted to be rewarded"

(27) "It is as though the very act of thinking about the nature of race and racism is still seen as 'dirty' work best suited for black folks and other people of color..."
On 'playing the race card': "(note how this very expression trivialized discussions of racism, implying it's all just a game)"
"White folks who talk race... are ... patrons, as superior civilized beings."

(35) "Of course the irony is that we are not actually allowed to play at the game of race, we are merely pawns in the hands of those who invent the games and determine the rules."

(37) "Anti-racist work requires of all of us vigilance about the ways we use language. Either/or thinking is crucial to the maintenance of racism and other forms of group oppression. Whenever we think in terms of both/and we are better situation to do the work of community building."

(44-45) "Whereas vernacular speech may seldom be used in the classroom by teachers it may be the preferred way to share knowledge in other settings. When educational settings become places that have as their central goal the teaching of bourgeois manners, vernacular speech and languages other than standard English are not valued. While acknowledging of standard English the democratic educator also values diversity in language."

(72) "Education as the practice of freedom affirms healthy self-esteem in students as it promotes their capacity to be aware and live consciously."

(76) "... to intervene in dominator culture, to live consciously, we must be willing to share with anyone knowledge about how to make the transition from a dominator model to a partnership model."

(80) "Significantly, anti-racist educational settings not only protect and nurture the self-esteem of all students, but also prepare students to live in a world that is diverse."

(81) "...teaching students to unlearn racism is an affirmation of their essential goodness, of their humanity."

(91) "politics of shame and shaming"

(94) "The self-segregation black folks do in integrated settings, particularly those where white people are the majority group, is a defense mechanism protecting them from being the victims of shaming assaults."

(107) NARRATIVE! "I rely on the sharing of personal narratives to remind folks that we are all struggling to raise our consciousness and figure out the best action to take."
Profile Image for zara.
123 reviews318 followers
August 9, 2022
exactly what I needed to read while managing both the excitement and dread of going back to school — excitement for learning & dread of institutions. I loved bell hooks’ writing about maintaining connection to self and to spirituality in education, remaining grounded in our senses and our personal experiences rather than denying our realities with false claims of objectivity, and education as a practice of freedom. I struggled a lot with the chapter ‘good sex’ and won’t get into why here now. Overall, this book left me feeling realistic yet hopeful.
Profile Image for Jesse.
465 reviews
November 24, 2009
A perplexing book-- if you look at it as a collection of essays, it makes more sense, but taken together it's a bizarre reading experience.

One of the reasons for this is that this is without a doubt the single most poorly copy-edited book I have ever read. It's hard to get through more than a few pages at a time without stumbling across a howler of a grammatical or sentence error that an editor has let stand. From time to time these errors are sneaky, but mostly they're glaring and obvious, interrupting the flow of the text and/or confusing the reader. That they were left the way they are is a sign of breathtaking incompetence on the part of the publisher-- and a little startling, considering that Routledge has a pretty good reputation as a reliable academic publisher.

Obviously, this publishing error doesn't say much about the content of the book even as it consistently attacks the reader's ability to take the book seriously. However, Teaching Community does itself damage in that regard as well. Some of the chapters seem as though they were rushed through--for example, the first chapter with hooks's comments on September 11th, which reads as unfocused, raging, and clouded with emotion without saying much of consequence, or a later chapter about sexual relationships between students and teachers, which expresses its main point several times in the same way and runs far too long, as though hooks was searching for the best way to phrase her argument.

bell hooks is, I think, well known for her brilliance and for her confrontational approach to matters of race, gender, power, etc. It's easy to see her brilliance in her chapters about race and racism issues. Throughout all of these, she's razor-sharp, challenging, insightful, and deep. The level of thought and scholarship she brings to those discussions is what attracted me to the book in the first place. However, outside of that subject, to which she's devoted so many years of thought and reflection, she's too often satisfied with making sweeping statements that she doesn't (or can't really) back up. Many times throughout the book she relies on referring to that which she opposes in the world and within academia by the absurd compound adjective "imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchal," and while I understand her reason for doing so, the choice of wording does a certain indignity to the reader, who could just as easily understand a substituted term to stand in for all those things and whose intelligence may feel slighted by reading the same bag of adjectives spilled out every page or few pages.

Coming from an author with so many intelligent things to say about the way that people relate to one another, this is just lazy. It can and should be done better. But then, many things in this book can and should-- various arguments are missing the meat of their positions or are predicated on broad, controversial statements that don't leave them especially sound. Personal diatribes that seem designed to settle scores with those in the academic setting hooks left should probaby have been left out or honed into something sharper. And someone should have paid the editor better.

That said, I can't cast this book entirely aside because of its wisdom in some chapters. In those, and in a few other places, it has provided me valuable advice and challenges both in my position as a teacher and also simply as a person-- a white male in a relationship with a woman, occasionally in a position of authority, and wrestling with what that entails. I wish this book had been written and edited with the time it deserved so it could have been as smart as it should have been. The combination of hastiness and laziness here is its downfall.
551 reviews3 followers
October 16, 2008
"Learned helplessness is necessary for the maintenance of dominator culture" This was my first book by bell hooks. I may be hooked. This was really the summary of everything I have been thinking about lately. Teaching, anti-racism, anti domination cultures. She also references Thich Naht Han who touched me after only a small dose of writing. I'm moving towards acceptance of the spiritual as part of the cure.

The book is about how academia upholds tha status quo. How dissident voices are needed as educators to break the white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy culture. bell hooks talks about the relationship of professor to student and how a lecture based on telling one viewpoint, and learning based on rote memorization is not getting us anywhere. How teachers need to inspire thought and experience based learning. Learning that is not relative to the future or to getting a degree to have a future. Now, now, now. Particularly the humanities. This type of typical learning reinforces the idea that someone dominates others and that that one person has the right idea.

She brought up the idea of "open dialogue" that may have been Thich's phrasing. But she defines open dialogue as the interaction between two people where there is space for both of them to change a bit of themselves. Kind of like ah, I see where you are coming from. She says that open dialogue is the way to form community between differences. She gives examples of her colleagues who she had respectful relationships with although they are white and male and conservative, but there is still room for them to interact and get a little closer together. This excites me so. This is what I want to achieve. The abilitiy to talk to people without talking down to them even if you think or know you are right. Coming at them with a I am interested in what you have to say because you formed that your whole life so I can't just trivialize that and say "cars suck", and here is what I have formed from my experiences and here are the reasons why. Its kind of like knowing why you do the things you do and not just doing them. I can see change being made in this way. Towards open dialogue. Here we go!!!!
Profile Image for axmed.
38 reviews12 followers
May 21, 2020
Highly recommended.

Here are a few bookmarks i made:

“Many white folks worked for civil rights, then passively dropped the struggle when critiqued by people of color or told by them they were not wanted. Anti-racist white folks recognize that their ongoing resistance to white supremacism is genuine when it is not determined in any way by the approval or disapproval of people of color. This does not mean that they do not listen and learn from critique, but rather that they understand fully that their choice to be anti-racist must be constant and sustained to give truth to the reality that racism can end.”

“When I hear white people complain about not being able to make the social contact they would like to have with people of color, my response is always to encourage them to work actively for racial justice, because that work will draw to them the community they desire, if their longing is sincere and not an excuse for living a life cloaked in unchanged whiteness.”

“When Shannon [Minnubst] asked me what were the circumstances that would entice me to teach, I told her that I would like to teach in an open classroom setting where anyone could come (staff and faculty); that I would like to teach teachers con- cerned with issues of race, gender, class, and religion in their classrooms; and I would dialogue with students.”

“Oftentimes, black students, like all students, may feel an immediate sense of safety if they are surrounded by people like themselves. This feeling of safety may free them from racialized stress and as a consequence they may be more open to learning. But it must be remembered that it is not segregation that creates a context for learning but the absence of racism.

Working to end racism in education is the only meaningful and lasting change that will benefit black students and all students. “

“Shannon [Minnubst], like other anti-racist white folks, made her commitment to working to end domination in childhood. Growing up in Texas she was acutely aware of racism; it was there in her family. Confronting her sexuality in high school also created greater awareness of group oppression: “Toward the end of my college years I had to deal with sexuality and that brought real surprises—dealing with all the self-hatred—learning what it feels like to be hated because you are different.” Now she can state: “Being a lesbian was hard but was easy because I was still white. It’s hard to be a woman, hard to be a lesbian but easy to be white.” When I asked Shannon what inspired her to move past the fear of difference that so many white folks are “stuck” in, she says: “When I feel fear in myself I am determined to get rid of it.”


53 reviews9 followers
January 11, 2011
Not a pedagogy proper but a loose collection of essays, 'Teaching Community' addresses the progressive potential of cultural studies, her experience of black womanhood in a white society, the tricky nature of white allyship, spiritual and 'death-aware' education, the effect of shaming on the performance of students of color, and her own educational experiences under Jim Crow. The writing is plain to the point of feeling clunky at times, and the book could stand editing (there's a chapter on her relationships with each of her siblings which didn't add anything to my experience of the book), but the book is full of original insights. I found myself taking notes as I read.
Profile Image for Haley Elmendorf.
58 reviews5 followers
January 12, 2021
Very quick, valuable read. Collection of hooks' personal accounts on how to be a dissident voice as an educator.
Profile Image for Lance.
32 reviews8 followers
January 9, 2014
I have so much to say about this book!

As a youth organizer, I'm just beginning to learn what it means to frame my work as educational in nature. This book gave me lots to think about, regarding the connection between education and community-building.

bell hooks seems to be in such a different place, at the writing of this book, compared to some of her her earlier works. I guess evolution is a sign of growth and consistent investment, though, right?

hooks gives a lot of emphasis to the value of creating integrated communities, as opposed to opting for closed spaces, or as she puts it, "segregated" spaces. I had a hard time with this, although I appreciate her point, that creating spaces for doing all the important work that exclude members of the oppressive majority are unrealistic and can often be less effective. I suppose I feel a little bit let down by this analysis, though. Perhaps I think it's oversimplification. Of course, failing to educate and work with willing members of oppressive classes does little to change the oppressive behavior; but working exclusively within the safety of our own communities of marginalized people yields the opportunity to share histories, build resilience, heal, and problem-solve more openly than in most contexts. I think balance is important.

The book dedicates two chapters to spirituality in education, which filled me with all the familiar conflicted feelings I have around spiritual expression and Blackness in Amerikkka; but once I got over myself, I feel like I agree with a lot of those ideas as well. In particular, her sentiment that "emotional connections tend to be suspect in a world where the mind is valued above all else, where the idea that one should be and can be objective is paramount" (127) struck a chord with me. In the world of social justice, those of us who fraternize with social workers might remember the National Association of Social Workers' Code of Ethics, and reflect briefly upon its analysis. This observation by hooks quickly escalates into a critique of objectivism in education, which is really where she brings it home for me. As far as I'm concerned, if you're not biased, you probably don't care enough. Thanks, bell hooks, for seeing it my way!

All in all, this is a dense read, and took a while to digest, but it was rich with outside references I want to look up, valuable challenges to my current politics, and suggestions for ways to hone my practice in the name of creating change, which I'm excited to put into practice.
Profile Image for Hope Harrington.
50 reviews2 followers
January 7, 2024
bell hooks provides a collection of essays that helps form a common language around education as a practice of freedom, maintaining radical openess, and building community.

She proposes that it's possible for learning to be an experience that builds and affirms self-esteem. 
She asks what does it look like when white people work to become anti-racist, men work to challenge sexism and patriarchy, and heterosexists begin to champion sexual freedom ... And how do we fumble? She affirms our attempt saying we are all struggling to raise our consciousness and figure out the best action to take.

The chapter good sex, enters a troubling space for me where I disagree with her. I'm generally wary of a defense of a sexual relationship where there is such a strong power imbalance, and when talking about student and teacher, is typically also a large age difference. Thats where I pull the star.

Some quotes: 
"Hopefulness empowers us to continue our work for justice even as the forces of injustice may gain greater power for a time. As teachers, we enter the classroom with hope... Living in hope says to us 'there is a way out' even from the most dangerous and desperate situations." (Xiv prologue)

"A profound cynicism is at the core of dominator culture wherever it prevails in the world...[it] normalizes violence, that makes war and tells us that peace is not possible." (11)

Talking Race and Racism:
"To build, community requires vigilant awareness of the work we must continually do to undermine all the socialization that leads us to behave in ways that perpetuate domination." (36)

"The assumption that 'whiteness' encompasses that which is universal, and therefore for everybody, while 'blackness' is specific, and therefore 'for colored only' is white supremacist thought." (39)

"We need to generate greater cultural awareness of the way white supremacists thinking operates in our daily lives. We need to hear from the individuals who know, because they have lived anti-racist lives, what everyone can do to decolonize their minds, to maintain awareness, change behavior, and create beloved community." (40)

Education as a practice of freedom:
"Education is about healing and wholeness. It is about empowerment, liberation, transcendence, about renewing the vitality of life." (43)

"Students who speak standard English, but for whom English is a second language, are strengthened in their bilingual self-esteem when their primary language is validated in the classroom. This valuation can occur as teachers incorporate teaching practices that honor diversity, resisting the conventional tendency to maintain dominator values in higher education." (45)

***"Diversity is a fact of modern life, especially in America. There are tremendous differences in our communities- ethnically, racially, religiously. Diversity suggests the fact of such differences.
Pluralism, on the other hand, is a response to the fact of diversity. In pluralism, we commit to engage with the other person or the other community. Pluralism is a commitment to communicate with and relate to the larger world- with a very different neighbor, or a distant community. Many educators embrace the notion of diversity while resisting pluralism or any other thinking that suggests that they should no longer uphold dominator culture." (47)***

"Anti-racist white women are not afraid to engage with critiques by black women/ women of color because those white women fundamentally understand that as long as we fear facing our differences and avoid conflict, we cannot arrive at a true place of solidarity and sisterhood." (61)

"People who may be very supportive of difference and diversity in theory are often unable to handle the concrete demands of change. Learning to live and work in a diverse community requires a commitment to complex analysis and the letting go of wanting everything to be simple. Segregation simplifies; integration requires that we come to terms with multiple ways of knowing, of interaction." (78)

"Service as a form of political resistance is vital because it is a practice of giving that eschews the notion of reward... The teacher who can ask of students what do you need in order to learn or how can I serve - brings to the work of educating a spirit of service that honors the students will to learn. Committed acts of caring lets all students know that the purpose of education is not to dominate or prepare them to be dominators, but rather to create the conditions for freedom. Caring educators open the mind, allowing students to embrace a world of knowing that is always subject to change and challenge." (91- 92)

"Creating trust usually means finding out what it is we have in common as well as what separates us and makes us different. Lots of people fear encountering difference because they think that honestly naming it will lead to conflict. The truth is, our denial of the reality of difference has created ongoing conflict for everyone... We become more sane ... when we learn to engage our differences, celebrating them when we can, and also rigorously confronting tensions as they arise." (109)

A mantra for loving and forgiving dysfunctional parents:
"Sincerely, I believe you two, mom and dad, did the best job of raising us that you could do given your circumstances- everything that happened to you and your family's of origin, much of which has been unresolved trauma. I appreciate all the care that you both give to me; that appreciation can and does coexist with critical awareness of things that were done that were not positive, loving, or nurturing of my emotional and spiritual growth. Sharing painful memories does not negate positive memories. If there had not been many wonderful aspects of my childhood, I would not seek to strengthen our closeness, to talk with you about my being, my work. It's the presence of so much good that keeps us together as a family. To stay together, to cherish our closeness, then, we have to be open and honest- sharing both our joy and our pain. (119-120)
Profile Image for Meg Petersen.
229 reviews29 followers
June 21, 2012
Parts of this were out of this world good; some slightly less. The chapter on sexual relations with students pushed me out of my comfort zone... Loved the perspective on racism and the academy.
Profile Image for Camille Marvin.
26 reviews
February 16, 2023
All I can say is that I am so grateful that bell hooks took up space in this world and shared her loving spirit with students everywhere. All of her writing leaves me feeling so inspired. Rest in power ❤️
Profile Image for Ella Quainton.
33 reviews2 followers
September 24, 2022
trying to read more bell hooks for libra season cause she blows me away every g*ddamn TIME!!!!!!!!!
Profile Image for Mina Richards.
87 reviews28 followers
March 8, 2022
It opened my eyes to a new way of thinking when teaching students. To bring a melody of learning that flows, equitable, and accessible for all involved in the process. Hope, community, language, and loving what you do begins the process of sustaining their attention and achieving so much more for you and them.
Profile Image for Lenore.
64 reviews
April 15, 2008
Another text I'm teaching. Not nearly as good as _Teaching to Transgress_, unfortunately. It's a good example of what Flower refers to as "writer-based prose." Hooks takes a lot of dense theoretical concepts and fails, in some cases, to provide a clear context for her readers, in this case, my students. She references Palmer a lot, too. In retrospect, I wish I would've chosen his text rather than hers. Still a fan of hooks, though!
Profile Image for Ching-In.
Author 18 books246 followers
February 17, 2009
What I appreciated most was when she got really specific about her own experiences with teaching -- what was hard about it & what lessons she learned. What I was frustrated by was when she got vague and meandering. I don't think this is her best book, but worth a read.
Profile Image for Iris.
319 reviews329 followers
April 11, 2022
The Star card, La Estrella, both in the tarot and Loteria it means the same thing. Spiritual or divine inspiration, the coming of hope in your life journey.

Last fall I came up on the one year anniversary of dropping out of school. One year of healing from a dark and retched place. But this time also has me reflecting on the progressive professors I had in college, that I now realize were putting bell hooks’ philosophy to practice. Teaching with love. No matter what material failure I had in my work, I know now that much of my own inability was brought by deep seated shame and anxiety. Reading through theory of pedagogy in hooks, Sedgwick, and Barbara Johnson this past year have allowed me to heal through reflection, and self led education.

I found some semblance of spirituality through academia, a place I thought would be completely secular. But backing up my reading in progressive issues with this kind of theory, it keeps the doom at bay.

I love bell hooks, I can’t wait to get my hands on the third in this trilogy.
Profile Image for Skye.
31 reviews
February 18, 2024
My feelings about this are complicated. In general, I don't think I'm particularly inclined to personal essays - and particularly so when they seem to see the world in "we/they" terms (with judgements on "they" and a knowingness of "we"). This felt like reading the teachings of a guru, and I suppose that has ended up being the space that bell hooks has taken on, which is very much not my sort of thing.

'For more than thirty years I have witnessed students who do not want to be educated to be oppressors come close to graduation -- and then sabotage themselves ... afraid that they will enter the system and become it, they turn away.'
89 reviews5 followers
January 7, 2023
These essays are highly personal reflections on teaching. Some of it is inspirational, as I have come to expect from bell hooks. However, the rest of it, particularly the chapters on spirituality and sexuality in the classroom, were a little beyond me. For example, her chapter on teacher- student romantic relationships (and how they aren’t typically more problematic than any other patriarchal relationships) might be true at the university level, but, like, what am I supposed to do with that? It seems she wrote that essay simply to justify her own brief tryst.
Profile Image for Gwendolyn Franklin.
12 reviews1 follower
August 8, 2023
I admittedly skipped around a bit with this book (unlike book 1 of this series) & intended on giving 4 stars. But hooks’ chapter “Heart to Heart” is a MUST READ.

“When we teach with love we are better able to respond to the unique concerns of individual students while simultaneously integrating those of the classroom community. When teachers work to affirm the emotional wellbeing of students we are doing the work of love.” (133)
Profile Image for Stephanie.
Author 5 books11 followers
July 4, 2019
It is nice that bell hooks intentionally uses language that isn't riddled with jargon. Academic work that is too dense to follow makes it inaccessible to most and she, rightly, realizes that.

For this book, the first 2/3 were solid and are potentially going to help form my dissertation framework. The last few chapters, eh, not my favorite.
Profile Image for Jacob.
163 reviews2 followers
February 1, 2022
some great nuggets in this one, but the essays don’t really stick to the theme and I don’t see much that’s building upon “teaching to transgress”—a lot of repetition.
Profile Image for Emma Duncan.
31 reviews
September 1, 2022
There is no one quite as articulate and well educated as bell hooks. Her quest for knowledge and keen curiosity reflect in every sentence of her writings.
Profile Image for Hannah.
42 reviews1 follower
April 12, 2023
"love will always change and challenge us"
Profile Image for Owen   .
66 reviews13 followers
February 14, 2008
I highly recommend this book to anyone who teaches or facilitates and anyone interested in deconstructing racism. It is so important. I wish I had read this years ago, before entering any learning environment as a teacher/facilitator.

This book shows how teaching can work to make learning a more human process, one that challenges and works to end racism, white supremacy and sexism. While bell hooks attempts to make the book accessible to any audience, it is still very academic, but her free flow of thought and honesty makes it an easy and satisfying read.

Quotes that spoke to me:
"Education as the practice of freedom affirms healthy self-esteem in students as it promotes their capacity to reflect and act in ways that further self-actualization, rather than conformity to the status quo." bell hooks

"To successfully do the work of unlearning domination, a democratic educator has to cultivate a spirit of hopefulness about the capacity of individuals to change." bell hooks

"Conventional pedagogy often creates a context where the student is present in the classroom to serve the will of the professor, meeting his or her needs, whether it be the need for an audience, the need to hear fresh ideas to stimulate work, or the need to assert dominance over subordinated students." bell hooks

"Teachers who fear getting close to students may objectify them to maintain the valued objectivity. They may choose to think of students as empty vessels into which they are pouring knowledge, vessels without opinions, thoughts, personal problems, and so forth. Denying the emotional presence and wholeness of students may help professors who are unable to connect focus more on the task of sharing information, facts, data, their interpretations, with no regard for listening to and hearing from students. it makes the classroom a setting where optimal learning cannot and will not occur." bell hooks

"Refusing to make a place for emotional feelings in the classroom does not change the reality that their presence overdetermines the conditions where learning can occur." bell hooks

"...the most powerful learning experience we can offer students...is the opportunity to be fully and compassionately engaged with learning." bell hooks

"Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word 'love' here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace-not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth." James Baldwin

"As good teachers weave the fabric that joins them with students and subjects, the heart is the loom on which the threads are tried, the tension is held, the shuttle flies, and the fabric is stretched tight. Small wonder, then, that teaching tugs at the heart, opens the heart, even breaks the heart-and the more one loves teaching, the more heartbreaking it can be. The courage to teach is the courage to keep one's heart open in those very moments when the heart is asked to hold more than it is able so that teacher and students and subject can be woven into the fabric of community that learning, and living, require." Parker Palmer

"The best thing for being sad is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails...Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you." Parker Palmer

"Education is about healing and wholeness. It is about empowerment, liberation, transcendence, about renewing the vitality of life. It is about finding and claiming ourselves and our place in the world...I want to explore what it might mean to reclaim the sacred at the heart of knowing, teaching, and learning-to reclaim it from an essentially depressive mode of knowing that honors only data,logic analysis, and a systematic disconnection of self from the world, self from others." Parker Palmer



Profile Image for Elisa.
65 reviews
Read
October 30, 2022

Educazione come pratica di libertà, connessione.
Whenever we love justice and stand on the side of justice we refuse simplistic binaries. We refuse to allow either/or thinking to cloud our judgment. We embrace the logic of both/and. We acknowledge the limits of what we know.
Understanding that there are times when we “must work for money rather than meaning, educator Parker Palmer describes in The Courage to Teach the way continuing to work at any vocation, but particularly teaching, when we are no longer positively engaged does violence to the self “in the precise sense that it violates my integrity and identity . . . When I violate myself, I invariably end up violating the people I work with. How many teachers inflict their own pain on their students, the pain that comes from doing what never was, or no longer is, their true work.”
The value of dislocation, like the value of disillusionment, is in the way that it moves us beyond illusion, so we can see reality in the round—since what we are able to see depends entirely on where we stand.
Cutting my secure ties to academic institutions, I faced the challenge of finding and creating spaces where teaching and learning could be practiced outside the norm.
CAPITOLO 3
Just as many unaware whites, often liberal, saw and see their interactions with people of color via affirmative action as an investment that will improve their lives, even enhance their organic superiority. Many people of color, schooled in the art of internalized white-supremacist thinking, shared this assumption.
Yet before he (King Jr.) was assassinated he was beginning to see that unlearning racism would require a change in both thinking and action, and that people could agree to come together across race but they would not make community. To build community requires vigilant awareness of the work we must continually do to undermine all the socialization that leads us to behave in ways that perpetuate domination.
“The best thing for being sad is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails . . . Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you.”
Education is about healing and wholeness. It is about empowerment, liberation, transcendence, about renewing the vitality of life.
Learning would then serve to educate students for the practice of freedom rather than the maintenance of existing structures of domination.
Competitive education rarely works for students who have been socialized to value working for the good of the community. It rends them, tearing them apart. They experience levels of disconnection and fragmentation that destroy all pleasure in learning.
One of the powers of subordinate groups is the power to demonize those who are in dominant positions. This demonization may serve to manage the fear and anxiety that usually abounds in situations where dominator culture is the norm, but it is not useful if our goal is to intervene and change structures and individuals.
If we want change, we must be willing to teach.
Still, I believe it is difficult for any of us to continue to do what we think is right when we do not receive affirmation and support.
Now he understands better that “learning to live and work in a diverse community” requires a commitment to complex analysis and the letting go of wanting everything to be simple. Segregation simplifies; integration requires that we come to terms with multiple ways of knowing, of interaction.
As a black teacher who works most often in predominantly white educational settings I know that teaching students to unlearn racism is an affirmation of their essential goodness, of their humanity.
“Shame is an inner sense of being completely diminished or insufficient as a person. It is the self judging the self. A moment of shame may be humiliation so painful or an indignity so profound that one feels one has been robbed of her or his dignity or exposed as basically inadequate, bad, or worthy of rejection. A pervasive sense of shame is the ongoing premise that one is fundamentally bad, inadequate, defective, unworthy, or not fully valid as a human being.” One of the ways racism colonizes the minds and imaginations of black people is through systematic shaming. The primary vehicle for this shaming is the mass media.
Rage serves a vital self-protective function: it shields the exposed self. At certain times, rage actively keeps everyone away, covering the self. We refuse further contact because rage has shut us in and others out. But at other times rage in response to shame may make us invite or seek direct contact with whoever has humiliated us.
We can allow them to experience their vulnerability among a community of learners who will dare to hold them up should they falter or fail when triggered by past scenarios of shame—a community that will constantly give recognition and respect.
Creating trust usually means finding out what it is we have in common as well as what separates us and makes us different. Lots of people fear encountering difference because they think that honestly naming it will lead to conflict. The truth is our denial of the reality of difference has created ongoing conflict for everyone. We become more sane as we face reality and drop sentimental notions like “We are all just human, just the same,” and learn both to engage our differences, celebrating them when we can, and also rigorously confronting tensions as they arise. And it will always be vital, necessary for us to know that we are all more than our differences, that it is not just what we organically share that can connect us but what we come to have in common because we have done the work of creating community, the unity within diversity, that requires solidarity within a structure of values, beliefs, yearnings that are always beyond the body, yearnings that have to do with universal spirit.
Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word ‘love’ here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace—not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth (J. Baldwin)
The black theologian James Cone says that our survival and liberation depend upon our recognition of the truth when it is spoken and lived.
Within a utopian world we would be able to dismiss class on such days because educating anyone when they are not present is impossible. Since we cannot leave we try to work with the reality that we have to produce the conditions for learning. We work with our absence to become present.
Parker Palmer urges teachers to transform education so that it will honor the needs of the spirit. Telling teachers “to see a transformed way of the being in the world,” he gives voice to spiritual yearning: “In the midst of the familiar trappings of education—competition, intellectual combat, obsession with a narrow range of facts, credits, and credentials—what we seek is a way of working illumined by spirit and infused with soul.”
Schooling that does not honor the needs of the spirit simply intensifies that sense of being lost, of being unable to connect.
It is essential that we build into our teaching vision a place where spirit matters, a place where our spirits can be renewed and our souls restored. We must become as articulate in naming our joys we are in naming our suffering. Thich Nhat Hanh teaches: “When you have suffered you know how to appreciate the elements of paradise that are present. If you dwell only in your suffering, you will miss paradise.” To me the classroom continues to be a place where paradise can be realized, a place of passion and possibility, a place where spirit matters, where all that we learn and know leads us into greater connection.
More often than not, the demands of academia were at odds with intellectual life.
M. Scott Peck defines true community as the coming together of “a group of individuals who have learned how to communicate honestly with each other, whose relationships go deeper than their masks of composure, and who have developed some significant commitment to ‘rejoice together, mourn together,’ and ‘to delight in each other’ and make the conditions of other’s our own.” Certainly, sharing laughter is necessary when we dare to enter the dialogues around difference that often evoke in us remembered woundedness or present pain.
Profile Image for Katrina Sark.
Author 11 books41 followers
June 26, 2017
p.xvi – Parker Palmer believes that enlightened teaching evokes and invites community.

2 – Time Out: Classrooms without Boundaries

p.15 – Understanding that there are times when we “must work for money rather than meaning,” educator Parker Palmer describes in The Courage to Teach the way continuing to work at any vocation, but particularly teaching, when we are no longer positively engaged does violence to the self “in the precise sense that it violates my integrity and identity… When I violate myself, I invariably end up violating the people I work with. How many teachers inflict their own pain on their students, the pain that comes from doing what never was, or no longer is, their true work.”

p.19 – “The courage to teach is the courage to keep one’s heart open in those very moments when the heart is asked to hold more than it is able so that teacher and students and subject can be woven into the fabric of community that learning, and living, require.” (Parker Palmer)

p.22 – Being an intellectual is not the same as being an academic. There is tremendous support in our society for the academic life for those who are insiders inside. Indeed, as those of us who have been privy to countless discussions about the differences between the academy and the so called “real” world know, many professors see themselves as members of a chosen group, a large secret society, elitist and hierarchical, that sets them apart. Even though colleges and universities have a corporate infrastructure, that power is usually masked. Most faculty choose denial over conscious awareness of the way crude economic politics shape academic environments.

3 – Talking Race and Racism

p.36 – To build community requires vigilant awareness of the work we must continually do to undermine all the socialization that leads us to behave in ways that perpetuate domination.

4 – Democratic Education

p.48 – one of the most positive outcomes is a commitment to “radical openness,” the will to explore different perspectives and change one’s mind as new information is presented. Throughout my career as a democratic educator I have known many brilliant students who seek education, who dream of service in the cause of freedom, who despair or become fundamentally dismayed because colleges and universities are structured in ways that dehumanize, that lead them away from the spirit of community in which they long to live their lives.

6 – Standards

p.72 – Education as the practice of freedom affirms healthy self-esteem in students as it promotes their capacity to be aware and live consciously. It teaches them to reflect and act in ways that further self-actualization, rather than conformity to the status quo.

16 – Practical Wisdom

p.185 – Coming to academia thinking of myself first and foremost as an artist (a poet, a painter, a writer), I pursued a teaching career as an avocation. My desire was to create art. This was a decision I made in childhood and I looked for the paths that would nurture and sustain this calling. College was the place where I would have time to study, to read, think, and learn, and I attended hoping it would empower me to be a thinking artist. My leaning toward art was directly related to my experience of the power of imagination. It was the imagination that fueled my hope as a young girl in a working-class Southern black home so that I would be able to create an artistic life for myself.

p.186 – By dreaming it I came to believe that I could leave the world of racial apartheid, of patriarchal family dysfunction and find my artistic self. I imagined I would find support in the academic world for my soul’s quest for freedom and independence of mind and spirit. During my undergraduate years I began to change my orientation. I did not stop artistic pursuits but I discovered that working with ideas was pure ecstasy for me: I embraced the calling to become an intellectual. This choice fit neatly with a teaching career. The heady years of graduate school taught me otherwise. I learned that being an academic was different from being an intellectual. I learned that most academics were not intellectuals and at heart were disdainful of the intellectual life. In the academic world (just like on the outside) intellectuals were depicted as nerds, geeks, anti-social monsters, just one lost argument away from being sociopaths, incapable of communicating with others. The intellectual was depicted as cold, unfeeling, and unable to function in the context of community. And, most significantly, intellectuals were patriarchal men.

p.187 – In his book Propaganda and the Public Mind, Noam Chomsky offers one of the most useful definitions of public intellectuals when he explains that they “are the ones who are acceptable within some mainstream spectrum as presenting ideas, as standing up for values.” The values that they represent usually reflect the status quo. They are conservatives or, at best, liberal on most subjects. Certainly, the work I do cannot be encompassed by this definition.
Chomsky defines “dissident intellectuals” as those who are “defenders of freedom.” They are critical of the status quo and they dare to make their voices heard on behalf of justice.

Profile Image for Cindy Leighton.
965 reviews23 followers
February 14, 2018
"All our power lies in understanding when we should teach and when we should learn."
"We must become as articulate in naming our joys as we are in naming our suffering."
"If we want change, we must be willing to teach."
"Where there is domination, there is no place for love.
bell hooks has so much wisdom to share - her words never cease to inspire me. I could paper my walls in inspirational quotes from her, and words I need to tell myself Every. Damn. Day.
In Teaching Community, hooks reminds us that we need to teach from a place of love, that rage in students too often comes from a place of shame, that students are not "empty vessels into which (teachers) are pouring knowledge, vessels without opinions, thoughts, personal problems, and so forth."

hooks makes us look at the world from many sides. She discusses the complexities of women's sexual agency and the dangers of always seeing women as victims She talks a great deal about dominating cultures that favor competition rather than collaboration, how dominant groups "often maintain their power by keeping information from subordinate groups." But reminds us time and time again that "one of the powers of subordinate groups is the power to demonize those who are in dominant positions. This demonization may serve to manage the fear and anxiety that usually abounds in situations where dominator culture is the norm, but it is not useful if our goal is to intervene and change structures and individuals."

hooks' ultimately is filled with hope, and fills me with hope (duh, it's in the title). She reminds us of the strength we all have to bring about change, and the importance of building trust not only with our students but with others. Good teachers ask "What do you need in order to learn? or "how can I serve?" I love her philosophy as teaching as a servant field - and questioning why we as a culture look down on people who choose to serve. Ultimate "Committed acts of caring let all students know that the purpose of education is not to dominate, or prepare them to be dominators, but rather to create conditions for freedom. Caring educators open the mind, allowing students to embrace a world of knowing that is always subject to change and challenge." Wow. She inspires me to be a better teacher.
Profile Image for Alex.
27 reviews2 followers
December 22, 2020
When I put this book down, I felt equally empowered and disheartened at the work still needed in creating community in the classroom. hooks affirms for me that wholistic approaches to teaching go beyond current conceptions of student-centered pedagogy. It’s relational and we really have to deconstruct dominating ways in which relational connections to students are instead furthering disconnections. I kept asking, “But how??” And hooks responded with several chapters on spirituality as a necessary foundation for pedagogy as well. I’m still not sure what to do with that, but I know I’ll be thinking about it for a while. So many texts on teaching try to give practical applications and promise to produce deliverables, but I found hooks telling us to focus on the being instead. I’m sure I’ll come back to this text again and again as I prep each semester.

All that to say, the structure acts as a series of short essays and could be read out of order if desired. I found the first 4 chapters to be helpful in collectively building an anti-racist definition of teaching that served as the premise for the rest of the claims hooks was making.

Profile Image for Niki Rowland.
282 reviews3 followers
June 14, 2020
“Creating trust usually means finding out what it is we have in common as well as what separates us and makes us different. Lots of people fear encountering difference because they think that honestly naming it will lead to conflict. The truth is our denial of the reality of difference has created ongoing conflict for everyone. We become more sane as we face reality and drop sentimental notions like ‘We are all just human, just the same,’ and learn both to engage our differences, celebrating them when we can, and also rigorously confronting tensions as they arise. And it will always be vital, necessary for us to know that we are all more than our differences, that it is not just what we organically share that can connect us but what we come to have in common because we have done the work of creating community, the unity within diversity, that requires solidarity within a structure of values, beliefs, yearnings that are always beyond the body, yearnings that have to do with the universal spirit.”
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